Behind Closed Doors
by Dorkfishe97
Summary: How can you love yourself when an abusive father is all you've known? What happens when someone finally comes around and shows you all the good things you never knew life had to offer? This is a revision of my previous version. VERY dark and EXTREMELY graphic. You have been warned.


Behind Closed Doors  
Preface

Worthless, dirty, slut, bitch, dumbass—the list of names I've been called never ends and still grows. In my scant, sixteen years of life I have known happiness, anger, sadness, but most of all pain. Under every emotion, good or bad, is the ever-present pain, and I have learned to live with it as a constant companion.

I suppose you could say that a time existed when I felt happy, even if I cannot really remember the details very clearly. The first five years of my life, as far as I can tell, seemed normal enough in my five-year-old mind. My mother and father appeared to be happy, as well as myself in my ignorant childhood bliss. I flourished in my environment and making friends came easily; everything happens as it should when a five-year-old naively misses what goes on behind closed doors.

Unfortunately, when I turned six, events took a turn for the worse. That year, my parents started fighting in front of me, and day by day, the fighting got worse. When I first started noticing change, it was just arguing: someone would get upset and storm out of the room. Then my father started screaming and breaking things. Not knowing any better, I just assumed that these things were normal in other households. Then the fighting became physical and I understood that this sort of thing didn't happen in other houses. Without the slightest bit of provocation, my father would lash out and hit my mother. My mother held on for a year, and a few weeks after I turned seven, she just picked up and left. I guess she couldn't deal with the pain at home, so she took off and just left me there to figure it out on my own.

I hurt but I knew my father felt the hurt even worse. Slowly, we stopped talking to each other. When he came home from work, he started drinking to try to ignore how that kitchen was devoid of the usual smell of cookies and my mother's perfume. When drinking alone couldn't numb the pain, he took to getting drunk, and when he got drunk, he got mean. The only way to escape from the hell I called home became school.

Some people must grow up faster than others must, but I didn't get the chance to choose for myself. Being only seven and a half, my drunken father hit me for the first time. After that, he ripped my innocence out of my grasp and plunged me headfirst into the world of adulthood. I learned how to survive; if not, I wouldn't have lasted long. From that point on, the responsibility of shopping, cooking, cleaning, and making sure the house payment went in on time fell to me.

Anyone with eyes could see that I wasn't like any of the other children at my school. For being young, I showed differences in my maturity level and the way I thought. The teachers constantly praised me for all of my hard work, and I loved the attention that they gave me. Even being so close to my teachers, not one person was aware of my home situation because I refused to let them know. My situation embarrassed me.

School wasn't always sunshine and rainbows all that time. The other girls picked on me all the time because of my oddities. I didn't laugh, giggle, or gossip with the other girls. I couldn't. It seemed impossible for me to pretend to be carefree with them when my plate was full from the happenings at home. They didn't understand me and I didn't understand them. It seemed that I was the different one, so people tended to stay away from me.

I spent most of my life without any friends. Through some blessing, on my first day of sixth grade, I made the first friend I had in a long time, and through some sort of miracle, we are still good friends today. Being weird too, he understood most of my quirks, so naturally we stuck to each other like glue. I'm now a junior in high school and he remains my only friend. Even though he continues to be my best friend, he doesn't know what my dad does to me. This stays the only secret I have ever kept from him.

I bet you're wondering who I am. Sometimes, I'm not even sure myself. I look in the mirror and I see a sixteen-year-old girl with black hair and tired blue eyes: nothing special and nothing remarkable or memorable. I don't really know who I am, just what the people around me pushed me to be.

So what do you call a scared, lost girl who doesn't even know who she is supposed to be? I guess, for now, you can just call me Kagome.

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A/N: So, I think we all knew this was coming. Revision. *chorus of groans* Sadly, this story has been added to my long list of revisions. A LOT of things have been changed, and I hope that it shows. Leave a review and tell me what you think of this new version!

Oh, and MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone :)


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